The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (38 page)

“The sun will probably be out in the morning. It hurts the eyes to look out of the window. There’s no gradation of light. Just flat hard glare and sudden shadow as a cloud passes. Later it will rain. If the rain
falls heavily enough you won’t be able to hear the people shouting. But after a bit the sound of the rain sends you barmy too. Since coming here I’ve started smoking. The cigarettes are always damp though. About eleven o’clock an old man called Pandit Baba Sahib arrives, ostensibly to teach me Hindi. My aunt pays for the lessons. The pandit has a dirty turban and a grey beard. He smells of garlic. It sickens me to catch his breath. The lessons are a farce because he speaks no English I recognize. Sometimes he doesn’t turn up at all, or turns up an hour late. They have no conception of time. To me they are still ‘they.’

“You ask me what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I’m at the mercy of my aunt’s in-laws for the moment. There are some Kumars still in Lucknow, apparently, and a brother of Aunt Shalini’s and his wife in the old Kumar house in the United Provinces. But they want nothing to do with me. Aunt Shalini wrote to them when she got the news of Father’s death. They weren’t interested. Father cut himself off from everyone but Aunt Shalini. He sold his land to his brothers before emigrating to England. This brother of his who’s still alive is afraid—so Aunt Shalini thinks—that I plan to claim back part of the property. She suggests going to a lawyer to see if the original sale was in order. In this she’s like every other Indian. If they can get involved in a long and crippling lawsuit they seem to be happy. But I want nothing to do with that sort of thing. So I’m dependent on her and her brother-in-law, Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, until I can earn a living. But what decent living can I earn without some kind of recognized qualification? Aunt Shalini would let me go to one of the Indian colleges, but it’s not for her to say, because Romesh Chand controls the purse strings. (After all, the Gupta Sens
own
her.) There’s a Technical College here that was founded by a rich Indian called Chatterjee. Sometimes I think I might try and get in there and work for an engineering degree or diploma or whatever it is a place like that hands out.

“Do you know the worst thing? Well, not the worst, but the thing that makes me feel really up against it? Neither Aunt Shalini nor Romesh Chand, nor any of their friends and relatives, know any English people, at least not socially, or any who matter. Aunt Shalini doesn’t know any because she doesn’t have any social life. The others make it a point of principle not even to try to mix. This is a tight, closed, pseudo-orthodox Hindu society. I’m beginning to see just what it was that my father rebelled against. If they knew a few English I don’t think it would be long before some kind of special interest was taken in my future. My five
years at Chillingborough can’t mean nothing, and there must be all kinds of scholarships and grants I could be put on to. But Aunt Shalini knows nothing about them, and seems afraid to raise the subject with anyone, and the Gupta Sens clearly don’t want to know. Romesh Chand says I’ll be useful to him in his business. I’ve seen his offices. I think I’d go mad if I had to work there. The main office is over a warehouse that overlooks the Chillianwallah bazaar, and there’s a suboffice at the railway sidings. He’s a grain and fresh vegetable contractor to the military station on the other side of the river. He’s also a grain dealer on his own account. And Aunt Shalini says he’s got his fingers in a lot of other enterprises. He owns most of the Chillianwallah Bagh property. This is the India you won’t read about in your pig-sticking books. This is the acquisitive middle-class merchant India of money under the floorboards, and wheat and rice hoarded up until there is a famine somewhere and you can off-load it at a handsome profit, even if most of it has gone bad. Then you sell it to the Government and bribe the Government agent not to notice that it’s full of weevils. Or you can sell it to the Government while it’s still in good condition and there’s no famine and the Government can let it go bad—unless of course it’s stolen from their warehouses and bought up cheap and stored until a Government official can be bribed to buy it all over again. Aunt Shalini tells me about such things. She is very naïve. She tells me things like this to make me laugh. She does not realize that she is talking about the people I’m supposed to feel kindred affection for, men like her husband, for instance, the late Prakash Gupta Sen. Somehow I must fight my way out of this impossible situation. But fight my way to where?”

Indeed, to where? It was not a question Colin could have helped him to answer because Hari never asked it of anyone but himself, and it was several months before he put it even to himself so directly, in such unequivocal terms. He had not asked himself the question before because he could not accept his situation as a real one. In that situation there was a powerful element of fantasy, sometimes laughable, mostly not; but a fantasy that was always inimical to the idea of a future stemming directly from it. In terms of a future, first the fantasy had to be destroyed. Something projected from the real world outside had to hit and shatter it. During this period he hung on to his Englishness as if it were some kind of protective armour, hung on to it with a passionate conviction the equal of that which his father had once had
that to live in England was probably enough in itself to transform life. And because he now felt that his Englishness was the one and only precious gift his father had given him he liked to forget that he had once been critical of him and year by year more ashamed of him. He fell into the habit of saying to himself whenever a new horror was revealed to him: “This is what my father hated and drove himself mad trying to ensure I’d never be touched by.” Madness was the only way he could explain his father’s “suicide.” And he was old enough, too, to guess that loneliness had heightened the degree of insanity. If Duleep Kumar had not been lonely perhaps he might have found the courage to face up to the financial disaster which the lawyers had succeeded in convincing his son of but never in explaining to that son’s satisfaction. In Mayapore, Hari saw that disaster as the work of the same malign spirit that now made his own life miserable.

Through most of his first experience of the rains he was chronically and depressingly off-colour. Whatever he ate turned his bowels to water. In such circumstances a human being goes short on courage. His indisposition and his distaste for what lay outside Number 12 Chillianwallah Bagh kept him confined to the house for days at a time. He slept through the humid afternoons as if drugged and grew to fear the moment when his Aunt Shalini would want his company, or suggest a walk because the rains had let up and the evening was what she called cool. They would go, then, towards the stinking river, along the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road to the Bibighar bridge, but turn back there as if what lay on the other side was prohibited, or, if not actually prohibited, undesirable. In all that time from May until the middle of September he did not cross over into the civil lines. At first he did not cross because there was no call to; but later he did not cross because the other side of the river became synonymous with freedom and the time did not strike him as ripe to test it. He did not want to tempt the malign spirit.

He crossed the river in the third week of September, in 1938, when the rains had gone and his illness was over and he could no longer find any excuse not to go through the motions of pleasing his uncle, Romesh Chand Gupta Sen; when, in fact, he had decided to please his uncle as much as was in his power, because he had talked to his uncle’s lawyer, a man called Srinivasan, and now had hopes of persuading the uncle to send him to the Mayapore Technical College, or to the college in the provincial capital.

“I will become,” he told himself, “exactly what my father wanted me
to become, and like this pay the malign spirit out. I’ll become an Indian the English will welcome and recognize.”

His father’s death had raised the question of moral indebtedness.

He went with some documents Romesh Chand told him were needed by a Mr. Nair, the chief clerk at the warehouse near the railway sidings. He traveled by cycle-ricksha. Few of the clothes he had brought from England were of any use to him. His aunt had helped to fit him out with shirts and trousers run up by the bazaar tailor. The trousers he wore today were white and wide-bottomed. With them he wore a white short-sleeved shirt, and carried a buff-coloured solar topee. Only his shoes were English; and those were handmade and very expensive. One of Aunt Shalini’s servants had polished them by now to a brilliance he himself had never achieved.

The traffic was held up on the Mandir Gate bridge. Immediately in front of the ricksha, obstructing the view, was an open truck loaded with sacks of grain. A sweating, half-naked coolie sat on top of the sacks smoking a “bidi.” Abreast of the ricksha was another; behind, a bus. The ricksha had come to a halt opposite the temple. There were beggars squatting in the roadway near the temple gate. He looked away in case he should recognize the leper. He heard the clanking of the train on the opposite bank but could not see it because of the truck. Five minutes after he heard the train the traffic began to move. The bridge had a parapet of whitened stone. He had a brief impression of water and openness, and banks curving away in muddy inlets and promontories, and then the three wheels of the ricksha were juddering over the wooden planks of the grade crossing and he was translated into this other half of the world.

His disappointment was as keen as his anticipation had been. The road from the Mandir Gate bridge to the railway station was lined with buildings that reminded him of those on the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road; but before the ricksha boy took a turn to the right, ringing his bell and shouting a warning to an old man who was chasing a berserk water buffalo, he saw a vista of trees and a hint, beyond the trees, of space and air. When the ricksha boy drew up in the forecourt of the station goods yard, which looked like all goods yards, graceless and functional, he told him to wait. The boy seemed to object, but young Kumar could not understand what he said, and walked away without paying, the one sure way he knew of keeping him there. He entered the
godown that bore across its front the sign
Romesh Chand Gupta Sen and Co, Contractors.
Inside there was the nutty fibrous smell of all such places. It was dark and comparatively cool. Labourers were carrying sacks of grain from a stack out into the the sunlit siding on the other side of the warehouse and loading them into a goods wagon. The air was full of floating dust and chaff. Set into the wall closest to him was an open door and a bank of windows that overlooked the vast cavern of the godown. This was the office. It was lit by naked electric light bulbs. He entered. The head clerk was not there. Two or three young men in dhotis and shirts of homespun cotton sat on trestle tables writing in ledgers. They remained seated. In his uncle’s office over the warehouse in the Chillianwallah bazaar the young clerks stood up whenever he went into their musty ill-lit rooms. That embarrassed him. All the same, suspecting that these clerks at the railway godown knew who he was, he could not help noticing the difference in their behaviour and momentarily feeling diminished by it. He asked where the chief clerk was. The man he spoke to replied fluently enough, answering English for English, but in a manner that was obviously intended to be offensive.

“Then I’ll leave these papers with you,” Kumar said, and put them on the desk. The young man picked them up and threw them into a wire basket.

“They are marked urgent, by the way,” Kumar pointed out.

“Then why do you leave them with me? Why don’t you take them with you and look for Mr. Nair in the station master’s office?”

“Because that’s your job, not mine,” Kumar said, and turned as if to walk out.

“These documents are entrusted to you, not to me.”

They stared at each other.

Kumar said, “If you’re not competent to deal with them by all means let them lie in your little wire basket. I’m only a delivery boy.”

When he was at the door the other man called, “I say, Coomer.”

He turned, annoyed to have it proved that the other man did know who he was.

“If your uncle wants to know whom you gave these papers to, tell him—Moti Lal.”

It was a name he expected to forget but in fact had cause to remember.

When he got outside the warehouse the ricksha boy had turned nasty. He wanted to be paid off. Kumar climbed in and told him to go to the
cantonment bazaar. He had worked out how to say it in Hindi. When the boy shook his head Kumar repeated the order but raised his voice. The boy took hold of the handlebars and wheeled the ricksha around, ran with it for a few paces and jumped onto the saddle. Kumar had to shout at him again when he began to turn back along the way they had come. They had another argument. Kumar guessed the reason for the boy’s objections. He did not want to take an Indian passenger so far. An Indian passenger seldom paid more than the minimum fare.

Eventually the boy submitted to his bad luck and turned towards the cantonment, and then Kumar found himself traveling along wide avenues of well-spaced bungalows. Here there was shade and a sense of midmorning hush such as fell at home, between breakfast and lunch during the holidays at Didbury. The road was metaled but the pathways were kuttcha. In the sudden quietness he could hear the rhythmic click of the pedals. He lit a cigarette because the odour of the leather cushions and the smell of the boy’s stale sweat were now more noticeable.

The boy made a series of left and right hand turns and Kumar wondered whether he was being taken out of his way deliberately, but then—where the road they were now traveling on met another at a T-junction—he could see a section of arcaded shops, and one with a sign over it: Dr. Gulab Singh Sahib (P) Ltd: Pharmacy. They had reached the Victoria road. He told the boy to turn left and indicated with a curt flick of the hand whenever the boy looked over his shoulder to suggest that now was the time to stop, that the journey should continue. He wanted to see beyond the cantonment bazaar. He wanted to go as far as the place he knew was called the maidan.